Hi I happened upon your tumblr because you liked one of my posts. Your posts are very intellectually stimulating so that makes me wonder, what are some of your favorite books? Also, I noticed that you have a myriad of interests, what major did you pursue in college, if you don’t mind me asking?

Why thank you!

I apologize if this post is a little long, but do hope it will be interesting. Probably best to read it in small bites.

As you may have guessed, since I do have a very wide range of interests, it’s quite a task for me to pick out my favorite books! I do read a lot of books, but I also learn by watching lectures, documentaries, listening to audiobooks, talking to people, and even just taking what I’ve learned and applying it to experiences. I also read academic papers, encyclopedias (not just Wikipedia), or sometimes I’ll just read a chapter from a book. I think how I’ll reply to your question is that I’ll mention at subjects and bodies of work in general. Here goes—

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, especially Beyond Good and Evil, his essay called On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense, and a book called The Gay Science (sometimes translated as The Joyful Wisdom). Unlike many philosophers, Nietzsche’s writings are very accessible for anyone with a pretty good command of whatever language they’re reading him in.

Among many things, Nietzsche’s work centers around highlighting the inherent dissonance between human consciousdesires, reason, and our spontaneous organic nature (actually, for Nietzsche, reason is intimately bound up in being afunction of our organic-nature selves. Same goes with our conscious desires.) Put in modern Cognitive Science/Psychology terms, he’s pointing out the dissonance and the unity of humanexecutive functions, instinct, personality characteristics, habituation, and the subconscious, but also the unity that this internal conflict leads to.

These were revolutionary ideas for the 19th century, hugely influential on Freud and the foundation of modern psychology, and still remains a prominent force in modern philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology. However, I don’t believe Nietzsche’s critique has been fully appreciated or realized by the public at large, or by science.

As well, I do like Nietzsche’s breaking downexceptionalism and the sorts of myths we tell ourselves in order to conceive of such exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is the belief that a particular group is superior because this group is totally separate from underlying patterns and conditions that affect all things — it either wasn’t effect by them, or overcame them wholly. He does a lot of critiquing ofGerman exceptionalism (he was German himself, and German nationalism was starting to pick up as a prominent political force when he was writing in the late 19th century [Germany didn’t become a unified nation until 1871]), Western Christian exceptionalism(especially Protestantism), European exceptionalism and Europe’s imperial heritage, and I think most importantly, Human exceptionalism, and our tendency to try to separate us from Nature and animals.

Yet, another major theme in Nietzsche is the universal nature and diversity of humanity, and the universal nature ofconditions and patterns that make up all organisms, including humans.

His concept of “Philosophical Genealogy” (this warrants a future essay to get into!) is also a major influence on my approach to human history, politics, and even to some extent my approach to what’s cutely being called “Big History”.

Big History is a vast interdisciplinary approach to history that looks over mass time scales of the past 14.5 billion years of the universe. It studies the evolution of physical forces, the elements and substances, the origin of life, biological systems and the biosphere, and in particular how all of this has formed human origins and history. David Christian is the main figure in this discipline — and while I’m not 100% in agreement with all of his work, I do strongly recommend his work, and I think his approach to history is just awesome.

The Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) by Immanual Kant. This book is a dense read. It was written in the late 18th century, and it’s a critique of the philosophical-scientific traditional as it was known at the time. The main thesis of the book is pointing out that reason, judgement, sensation, and the sorts of insight we can gather from experimentation and speculation, are entirely dependent on us as a spontaneously organized orgasm. Reason does not exist in a void — reason is conditioned by the limitations of our experience and the mind. There’s a tendency in many of us intellectual inclined to naively value this “pure reason” and totally ignore the spontaneous, non-rational conditions that make all of our experiences possible (including what we can and cannot think about) in the first place.

Of course, the Critique goes much deeper than this. It immensely influenced Albert Einstein, many scientists from the 19th century, and many Quantum scientists of the 20th. It was probably a reading inspired by Kant that got Einstein to seriously think about the nature of the Observer, and how the Observer influences the very experiment he is trying to conduct by just observing it. (Probably also some Hegel in there, and Ernst Mach.)

Unfortunately, Kant’s work is neglected by scientists these days — which I don’t blame them for, because “professional philosophy” practiced in the academia is becoming a very, very, verypedantic and pretentious subject, filled with useless dogmatic schisms over hair-splitting trifles. There’s also a lot of hyper-specialization going on in the academia, which prevents these multi-disciplinary insights. (See my essay on this subject [link].)

But I do think Kant has some very valuable insight into modern scientific practices and investigations. For instance, we see how much emphasis is placed in science nowadays onsimulation, data-mining, and certain paradigms that neglect the influence of the observer; or how there is a tendency in science to assume a one-to-one congruency of human conception about an observable phenomenon, and with what’s actually happening. We humans — as thinking, sensing beings — are intimately part of the very experiments that we conduct, and the very patterns we try to investigate.

A reading of Kant can give us valuable insight into this… But if you’re not already into philosophy, it’s a *very* time consuming process to go back and read Kant. I don’t recommend it. You’d have to read who he’s reacting to, reinterpret him in his historical context, and view him in the light of recent developments in science and math if you want him to be a gainful read, etc etc. Basically, we need a new commentator to step up and have another look at Kant for 21st century science and math. Maybe that’ll be me in a few years 😉

Writings of Stephen Jay Gould. He does a lot of work on Evolution, especially breaking down myths about evolution (mths both by Creationists, and people who accept evolution). He does a lot to smash this notion of teleology in evolution (the view that things evolve for a purpose), and a lot of valuable insight into human nature, underlying patterns in biology, etc. He’s also a very accessible and fun read — I highly recommend all of his books!

Favorite historians are OswaldSpengler and Ibn Khaldun — not that I think they were entirely right about everything they wrote (hardly!), but their approach to history is revolutionary. They focused on the collective, aggregateresults of human nature, especially human historical and sociological behavior, as something that can be understood in a greater World-System. There is also an understanding of human civilization, or particular kinds of civilizations, as a kind of organism.

As far as literature goes, hmm. Ludimagister has reminded me how much I love Goethe. The Romantics of the early 19th century — I love their seamless mixing of philosophy, mysticism, and science. William Blake, Percy & Mary Shelley,Schiller… Many 19th century poets actually drew a lot from the scientific tradition, like Robert Frost who actually wrote quite a bit about entropy and heat-death (which arrogant English majors don’t even realize!)

Very fond of cyberpunk, certain science-fiction, historical fiction. And I read a lot of old religious texts and mythology.

Second part of your question:

In university, I majored specifically in Archaeology and Philosophy. (Double-major was required at the particular institution)

But I’ve been self-taught in many subjects since a very early age. As a small child, I used to spend hours at a time watch Discover Channel and TLC (back when it was aboutactually learning) on evolution, astronomy, psychology. My parents weren’t into such things, but they were into politics, so I had an early age exposure to political arguments at the dinner table. Slowly, that turned into an interest into philosophy and politics, then into history, I’ve stuck with it since.

Not to discourage others who, but at least in my particular case, university was the least productive learning experience in my entire life.

Caption: “The Lyceum” — the School of Aristotle. Were these just Aristotle’s followers, or the ancient think-tank that ghost-wrote his entire corpus?

The issue of plagiarism and ghostwriting in the pre-modern world is something that doesn’t receive much press because it conflicts with:

Our romantic notions of the past as somehow better or more authentic than the modern day, and,

It conflicts with our Creation Myths of the great idols, great men and great civilizations revolutionarily founding the world we live in.

Apparently, it’s fine to call into question the existence of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, but to even question the originality and intellectual honesty of Shakespeare, Newton, or Darwin?[1] — what [secular] heresy is this!? (Seriously, folks![2])

I will offer an alternative theory here for so-called historic ‘polymathy’, why it was more prevalent in the past than now. The theory is pretty simple: that the great thinkers were never held accountable for the originality of their ideas at the time they were proposed — it was sufficient enough that they were just recorded (somehow, be it through primary or secondary sources) as saying it, and that it was picked up by a contemporary scholar (*assuming the text even survived). There were no elaborate academic institutions to keep this sort of thing in check — no Deans office that Descartes could be sent to for repeating Anselm’s Ontological Proof in his Meditations, no PhD committee/auditing agency stopping Al-Kindi from ctrl+c/ctrl+v-ing everything he read in Aristotle. Students were not graded for how original their ideas were — they were usually rewarded for how much they imitated their teacher. And they often went further in the academia-aristocracy based off their charisma and the profundity of whatever they were saying. (Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?)

Case example: In Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (this is a lengthy book on history, sociology, economics, political science, etc.), when he discusses the role of climate in the success of civilizations — the notion (in sum) that temperate climates produce temperate peoples and thus leads to successful civilizations — the same ideas more or less appear Aristotle’s Politics. What is this?:

Is this a coincidental convergence of two brilliant minds stumbling on the same ideas independently?

Or were these ideas perhaps already widely circulated in an oral tradition that dealt with these topics of meta-history — say, oral tradition of the kinds of discussions that took place in cafes, mosque/temple courtyards, the marketplace, around the campfire, caravan at late nights, etc. — and Ibn Khaldun (and Aristotle?) got their ideas from that?

Now, knowing from my own readings on this, the Politics was not known in the medieval Middle-East, so that throws (b) out. A makes sense. What about A as consequence of C?

These kinds of questions are always hotly debated by usually a handful of unfamous scholars obsessed with seemingly petty questions like this, with no real definitive conclusion. I will say this though: oral tradition is never something considered by these scholars, because it’s allegedly not recordable. And we all know from our Grade 7 essay writing classes, that the academia has a bias for things written. If it’s not written, it may as well not exist to the academia.

These scholars also lack the funding/time/patience/motivation/ambition to reconstruct a kind of history of the spontaneous, grass-roots transmission of ideas, or to read the works of historians of ideas on the topic. But why? Oral traditions carry such a wealth of information, formed through peculiar events and in a historio-cultural matrix. I wonder if scholars of the future, when studying the great thinkers of our time, will still ignore the role of chatrooms, social media, and blog comments, even after they’ve been clearlyrecorded, in the history of the transmission of ideas.

–Again, Blind men and the Elephant paradox (of the Academia).

But plagiarism — even the whole notion that one had to be an original thinker — is a bit of a post-Enlightenment idea (not to say this didn’t exist elsewhere, but our current notion of it goes right back to the Romantics). Many students and thinkers were expected to emulate the great masters, and the great schools and traditions, and felt reward and satisfaction in doing so.

Now, through careful textual analysis of what actually survives of these great thinkers, it is revealed that they often did not even do the writing themselves. They were recorded by scribes, either during a lecture, after one, or long after their death. Plotinus was blind by the time he composed his Enneads, so required the help of scribes to write down his book. Aristotle’s entire corpus — according to tradition — wasn’t compiled until after his death, and his writing doesn’t even read like an essay; they read like scattered lecture notes.[3] Aristotle’s lectures on mysticism were never written down. Aristotle’s famed Dialogues (written like Plato’s dialogues) have not survived antiquity. Avicenna, al-Ghazali, al-Farabi, Meister Eckhardt, Ochkam, Anselm, etc., a whole slew of medieval thinkers, only received their fame in the books written by their students, compile from their lecture notes and discussions with the teacher. It’s a bit like your band becoming world famous for the bootlegs made off of your guitar tabs, where the bootleg isn’t actually of your band, but of someone else performing your music — and all of this taking place after your death.

As a scribe, like a good guitarist playing tabs, you must have a certain understanding of what your teacher/lecturer is saying in order to coherently record it, even if you don’t fully understand the whole thing. Many scribes might also input their own thoughts, beliefs and culturally-determined preconceptions when recording the lectures of their masters, much as how modern university students do nowadays when taking notes.

In other words, what was going on wasn’t this:

It was this:

Now I don’t want to give the impression that all pre-modern/pre-Renaissance thinkers never wrote any essays themselves — they certainly did, but what survives of their corpus is this hodgepodge of lecture notes, essays, hearsay, rumors, and misinterpretation.

Manuscripts also had to be re-copied by hand (after the 15th century: by printing press) in order to preserve the book’s transmission. This was the task of libraries, monasteries, universities, and churches / mosques / synagogues. Not all scribes are equal, sometimes only a part of the manuscript was copied, because the full length volume existed in a library (only to have the library be destroyed by the Seljuks, the Franks, or the Mongols, and the small part would be what is preserved.) There are also cases where manuscripts have just lost the title page or other ancient meta-data, and have been falsely attributed to this or that thinker.

Other writers would write something and attribute it to a great thinker, usually in order to legitimize an idea, or make money off the manuscript (Aristotle and Plato were hot best-sellers back in the day) — but I also suspect that same sentiment that gives birth to modern fanfiction to be involved in these kinds of writings. Something recently in the news of this kind of authorship issue is with the Gospel of Barnabas.

In sum, our ancient texts, in their current incarnation, is the result of a grand, multi-thousand-year-old historic game of broken telephone, and the survival of best sellers.

Another case in point: there was a book in wide circulation in the Middle-Ages — mostly in the Middle-East and Byzantium — called The Theology of Aristotle, which was basically a copy-paste of Plotinus’ Enneads. Whoever made it, attributed it to Aristotle (hence the name), probably for economic reasons. The impact of this book is tremendous and often overlooked by scholars writing on this — if written by Aristotle, it would mean he was a Neoplatonist, which makes it seem as though Plato and Aristotle were generally in agreement with one another. Anyone who knows anything about philosophy today has been taught that two philosophers are opposites — that was not the case in the Middle-Ages. If this text’s authenticity was not doubted, and we still thought it belonged to Aristotle, we would have a radically different view of the Ancients, and the history of early modern science would’ve looked quite different.

That said, Aristotle has allegedly written actual mystical works, which have not survived (probably not even recorded?). But it’s not the Theology of Aristotle.

Given all of this, it is certainly, without a doubt, very possible that the corpus of Aristotle was mostly or entirely a production of his school — the Lyceum — in order to legitimate the school’s curriculum, status and prestige at the time. I can make the same claim about Plato’s corpus and the Academy of Athens, and probably many other pre-modern thinkers that were so-called “polymaths”. What I mean to say is: Aristotle and Plato, thinkers of this type, were brand names for ancient think-tanks that assembled themselves around a semi-mythical idol. Aristotle and Plato as their works have survived were products of an entire school writing an encyclopedia of knowledge attributed, and attributing it to their founding Master. What I mean to say is: they themselves were not actually polymaths, but idols who were ghostwritten for.

Again, this goes back to the human desire for Creation myths, Idols, and figures.

And again, this is just speculation. That said, if anyone reading this knowledgeable on this subject wishes to discuss this, please feel free.

Ismael Sarepta

[1] And I didn’t choose Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin randomly out of a hat. These are all great men whose products of genius are shrouded in myth, and all have very serious authenticity, originality, and authorship issues. Isaac Newton invented Calculus “independently” (or so it is claimed) at the same time as Gottfried Leibniz did. Charles Darwin didn’t feel the need to public his theory of Evolution until another younger man came along (Alfred Russell Wallace) with the exact same theory, threatening to steal Charles’ thunder. And Shakespeare? Bitch, please, you think the Bible was bad with its authenticity?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question

[2] If you’re going to smash Creation Myths of human origins with Evolution, please be consistent, and do so with the rest of human history!